davidpaulrosser{blog}

I’ve been speaking with Neil Tomlinson (the founder of Aquapax) about this project. He mentioned a previous piece of work I created ‘Natural Reflections’. He had an idea to work with this style and adapt it to a working theme with Aquapax.

So, I created a storyboard (and a new post), codename: AquapaxV2. The storyboard is more of an advert than a viral in my perception, but I think it works rather well in terms of the quality that the brand stands for.

I’ve since started this animation and will post screenshot’s soon.

(I’m still working with Justin on his idea too, we start filming tomorrow).

An update – work in progress

Here’s a still from each scene of the animation.

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

So, I’ve been pretty busy the past few days. The development of this animation has surprisingly gone quite well. Here’s a breakdown of the technical issues involved with each scene:

Scene 1

This was surprisingly the hardest scene. I had to come up with a shader that looked like a water drop without a environment reflection. In the end I used a Blinn shader with modified attributes.

For the animation of the water drop I applied soft bodies to the mesh with a turbulence field to the particles to deform the mesh in a water like way.

I rendered this scene in Mental Ray.

Scene 2

This scene was fairly straight forward. I used a HDRI map to give the water drop a reflection. The reflected image is from the nature park where Aquapax is sourced from.

I rendered this scene in Mental Ray.

Scene 3

I was dreading this part. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do what I originally had in mind. BUT, it went rather well. I used Maya’s Paint FX for the shrub and flowers. This enabled me to animate the growth and twist of the plants. I used Maya’s preset for the grass under the Fur shelf and modified a few attributes to get it looking the way I wanted it.

Rendering this scene was the technical part. I know from past experiences how long Mental Ray takes to render fur. Especially with Raytracing and the quality setting of ‘Production final trace’ on! Even If I used Mental Ray to render this scene I would of had to convert all my Paint FX into polygons losing the control of animation for the shrub and plants. Luckily, Maya’s software render was able to render this scene out with no quality loss. Since I wasn’t using Raytracing for this scene it didn’t matter.
The best thing about this was the render times. It took about 3 seconds to render a frame compared to 5 minutes on average for a frame in the other scenes when rendered with Mental Ray.

Scene 4

Neil sent me a folder of images previously in the week (for inspiration). One of the images pictured a transparent globe. The idea of using a transparent earth worked better with the style I was trying to achieve. I used a Phong E shader with a colour and transparent map to achieve the same look of the globe.

I rendered this scene with Mental Ray for the reflections and refractions of the Phong E shader.

Scene 5

All I had to do for this scene was to duplicate a load of sphere’s and place them randomly to look like water particles inside the Aquapax carton. This scene acts as a transition into scene 6.

I rendered this scene with Mental Ray for the reflections and refractions of the water particles.

Scene 6

A simple transition eased to a framed shot of the Aquapax carton where additional text appears.

If you take a look at the Aquapax carton you will notice parts of the packaging has foil within the design. I wanted to create a realistic carton. So for this I created a specular map. The specular map details where the light should highlight the surface of an object. Creating the specular map enabled me to produce a similar result to the foil in the packaging. This turned out rather well considering its the first specular map I’ve ever created for a 3D model.

I rendered this scene with Mental Ray.

The completed animation: Aquapax Eco friendly advert

As the deadline looms near I set ahead and uploaded the completed animation to Vimeo via their Desktop Uploader (Adobe Air App). Enjoy!

Aquapax Eco friendly Advert from David Rosser on Vimeo.

And the YouTube version:

Conclusion

The animation is only 15 seconds long but I feel like I’ve captured and put across the important key issues that Aquapax promotes within their brand. I personally wouldn’t class this animation as a viral, it works better as an advert.

The brief did state to create a viral medium. This is what I orginally intended to produce. But through the course of the process, I wanted to underly the importantance of the superiority of the water itself. I felt that this was unachievable through a viral.
To conclude this project I do believe that this could work in conjunction with the other virals created by the other students for this brief.

Brief: A viral medium to promote a new beverage brand called ‘Aquapax’

So i’ve been given the new brief… Its to produce a viral medium to promote the product ‘Aquapax’.
Aquapax is a relatively new independent water brand from a company called Just Drinking Water Ltd. It was developed by the brand owner Neil Tomlinson – a committed ecologist and activist.

Aquapax has set out to combat the inferior quality of other branded bottled water distributed throughout the planet. My objective is to promote this upcoming brand by creating a viral medium to spread the word about the qualities of this product.

Firstly im going to break down the product. Using my opinion and a Aquapax information PDF. In order to produce a successful medium I need to re-engineer the product – to find its strengths and weaknesses. This will enable me to promote the best reasons why to buy the product.

Pros

• Easy to read and say brand
• Funky packaging
• One of the purest ‘bottled’ waters on earth
• Near perfect 7.1pH, a naturally low mineral balance
• Ultra low nitrate levels. Aquapax has 12 x lower nitrates than Evian &
  21 x lower nitrates than Volvic.
• Sealed protection from air and light
• Aquapax carton is the lowest carbon impact container for portable
  water intended for resealing and re-use
• The package is majority paper (72%) sourced from sustainable forests
  with the remainder aluminium (5.5%) and LDPE (22.5%) guaranteeing a
  non-leaching container of absolute integrity.
• Suitable for babies
• More planet conscious than alternative portable waters.
• The business is carbon balanced and ethics led.

Cons

• Paper carton ‘could’ break under pressure
• Price comparison to other related branded products
• Comes only in 500ml cartons
• Availability through retail stores
• An invisible brand to most of the public

So far I’ve got alot of good attributes to play around with. The challenge is how im going to develop this into a viral medium. The next step is to do some research on viral communication.

Viral Communication

So what’s viral communication? It’s a process of passing on information through a medium that has certain attributes tied to it. These attributes have strategies that hook people into watching them.

A good example would be:

You can see that someone has attached a dramatic piece of music to emphasize the hamsters movement and facial expression. A hamster impersonating a humans personality makes the video funny to watch. This would then prompt the viewer to pass the video on for various reasons.

Viral communication is at extremely low cost. Instead of going for big buget advertising campaigns your using the audience to spead the video like wildfire.

I watched an ironic video on youtube that tells you how to make a viral video:

The guy who created this: Joe Sabia, talks about various techniques and strategies to use in order to create a successful video. Here’s a list of some of the techniques he talks about:

• Content is not king: Make it short 10-30 seconds, design for re-mixing, something for people to make changes to, don’t make an ad unless its absolutely awesome to watch, make it shocking
• Getting onto the most viewed pages of sites, such as youtube: Post threads, start conversations, send emails
• Title Optimization: Once your video gets noticed change the headlines to something misleading that will lure other people into watching it
• Change the thumbnail of your video: Put the most interesting screenshot of your video in the middle so video sites will place it on the listings page
• Engage in conversation on the videos comments
• Use random tags: Something that will catch the viewers eye

This is gold information for the development of this medium. Its time to sketch out some ideas!

So, i’ve been trying to generate some ideas for this project. I’ve been looking around random sites for inspiration. It’s extemely hard trying to come up with an orignal concept.

Here’s a video I really liked:

This animation is very addictive to watch (and its about WATER!). There’s so much creativity with such basic objects. I like the way it keeps you interested throughout the animation as you wonder whats going to happen next.

Viral communication test

I wanted to perform a little test to see the power of viral communication. I posted a message on my Facebook and Twitter account saying:

I didn’t recieve a bucket load of comments back but it still prompted some people to comment back on it. Posting something with an intriguing headline will make people look into it as Joe Sabia mentioned before.

Inspiration!

I absolutely love the Cravendale adverts. When I first watched them broadcasted on national TV I was in hysterics of laughter. What makes these adverts so successful is the use of pure randomness. The advert lets you reflect on your childhood memories whilist relaying a subtle message of how milk matters to you, as the consumer.

Cravendale like to emphasize in their advertising campaign that they filter their milk for a purer taste. This is very similar to Aquapax’s key promotion points. If you can prove these points to the mass audience that in some terms it’s ‘better’ than other brands, you have a strong selling point.

An Idea!

Im sure most of you reading this has watched Derrin Brown’s “The Events” over the past month. In one of his episodes he talks about and demonstrates subliminal messaging.

Subliminal messaging is a signal or message embedded in another medium, designed to pass below the normal limits of the human mind’s perception. These messages are unrecognizable by the conscious mind but in certain situations can affect the subconscious mind and can negatively or positively influence subsequent later thoughts, behaviours, actions, attitudes, belief systems and value systems. Source

I’ve been drawing away on paper trying to generate an idea, I finally realised that the idea was always there, subconsciously. The research I’ve done has influenced my actions to draw figure’s on paper trying to bring them to life. The weird part of this is, is that that I had the idea, I just didn’t realise i was drawing it out. Confused?

The final storyboard!

Over the past few days Ive been so busy with this project I haven’t had the time to update this post with new stuff. So prepare yourself for awesomeness… (joking)! Here’s the final storyboard:

So basicly the story is about how im trying to come up with an idea for this brief. After I leave my desk at night mysterious things start to happen.

Frame (1) Shot of room (setting the scene) (Not in drawing).
Frame (2) Close up shot of Aquapax carton.
Frame (3) A character peels of the Aquapax carton.
Frame (4) Character pushes himself off.
Frame (5) Falls onto the desk.
Frame (6) He gets up.
Frame (7) And thinks, hmmm, I would sure like some of that Aquapax.
Frame (8) So, he tries to jump up. Fails.
Frame (9) He suddenly has an idea!
Frame (10) He walks over to the paper.
Frame (11) Lifts a pencil up off the table (not in drawing).
Frame (12) Draws another dude out.
Frame (13) Helps him up off the paper.
Frame (14) Tells him the plan!
Frame (15) They both lift a ruler up of the table.
Frame (16) They place it on the pencil case (not in drawing).
Frame (17) The Aquapax dude jumps on the ruler sending the other one in the air.
Frame (18) The guy misses the carton completely and lands into the bulb (Ouch!).
Frame (19) The guy falls down on fire. Holding on with his last few limbs (poor guy!).
Frame (20) A framed shot of the Aquapax carton with a title of “Aquapax: Worth the effort!”.

The animations around 35-40 seconds.

The 3D part!

Countless hours of modelling, texturing and lighting has gone past. But here’s the result so far!: (By the way, I still have to remake the Aquapax carton!).

The end?

After I made the scene, textured it and lit it I was ready for the animation. I tried to set up a rig for my character to animate him in the scene. As im pretty new to bones in Maya I though this would be a great way to learn how to do it. Although I seriously underestimated the technical aspect to it.
I tried for two days trying to animate the character in the scene. I was having numerous problems with the bones distorting the mesh, even after I painted the weights on the mesh.

Before it was too late I decided to put an end to this idea. Which is a terrible dissapointment to myself and to the others. I really did underestimate the animation part. I have a few final renders to share with you:

So what’s next?

I was talking with Justin Moser yesturday about teaming up on his idea. He orginally needed myself for the skateboarding part of his viral so this should work quite nicely.

Skate viral inspiration

This guy is absolutely insane. He has such a unique skating style. He has a very different approach to skating than most other skaters.

This is captured from Skate 2. A skateboarding game published by EA games. The guy who made this came up with an interesting technqiue. He stops time to create a path for the skater to use.